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Reform the schools, improve teaching: these battle cries of American education have been echoing for twenty years. So why does teaching change so little? Arguing that too many would-be reformers know nothing about the conflicting demands of teaching, Mary Kennedy takes us into the controlled commotion of the classroom, revealing how painstakingly teachers plan their lessons, and how many different ways things go awry. Teachers try simultaneously to keep track of materials, time, students, and ideas. In their effort to hold all of these things together, they can inadvertently quash students' enthusiasm and miss valuable teachable moments. Kennedy argues that pedagogical reform proposals that do not acknowledge all of the things teachers need to do are bound to fail. If reformers want students to learn, they must address all of the problems teachers face, not just those that interest them. (20050801)
E-Book Content
INSIDE TEACHING
INSIDE TEACHING How Classroom Life Undermines Reform
MARY
KENNEDY
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2005
For Tom
Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kennedy, Mary M. Inside teaching : how classroom life undermines reform / Mary Kennedy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01723-4 (alk. paper) 1. Classroom environment—United States. 2. Educational change—United States. I. Title. LC210.5.K46 2005 371.1—dc22 2004060570
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Pew Charitable Trusts for providing financial support for this study. Their generosity paid for research assistants, for videotaping equipment, for transcribing expenses, and for time, the most valuable of commodities in research. Throughout this book I rely on the rhetorical convention of using “we” whenever writing about anything a researcher saw in a classroom or anything a researcher asked a teacher in an interview, even though no more than one person directly witnessed any classroom or interviewed any teacher. These observations and interviews were conducted not only by me but also by my colleagues Rachel Lander, Paula Lane, and Brenda Neumann. They not only gathered data but also contributed in numerous ways to the design of the study, the sample selection, the interview guides, and the analytic strategies. Teachers demonstrated a generous willingness to participate. Because we not only interviewed them but also entered their classrooms and videotaped their lessons, the study was much more invasive than most research projects. Some teachers were accustomed to being videotaped, but many had never seen themselves on tape, including one teacher who had taught for 30 years. The prevailing norms of privacy in teaching make it all the more impressive that v
vi Acknowledgments
these teachers were willing to allow a stranger to enter, videotape, and then interrogate them about their teaching practices. I am indebted to them all. Once teachers were interviewed, audiotapes came streaming into Michigan State’s College of Education, where an extremely organized person, Kathy Lessard, trained and coordinated a pool of transcribers who converted the tapes to transcripts. Although I don’t know the names of all the transcribers, I thank them and Kathy for their contributions. Richard Elmore, Paula Lane, Brenda Neumann, and Alan Shoenfeld critiqued earlier versions of this book. Their comments were enormously helpful in moving my thinking and in helping me find better ways to present my ideas. Adam Gamoran commented on one section and provided helpful insights. I am grateful to them all. Earlier versions of parts of Chapter 2 appeared as “Reform Ideals and Teachers’ Practica